Friday, November 9, 1:45-3:15pm
Asian Musics, Transplanted
Chair: Jennifer Jones Wilson (Westminster Choir College)
The musical traditions of Asia survive, thrive and are transformed in the United States for a wide variety of reasons. This panel explores the journeys that Indonesian, South Indian and Chinese musics have taken when they entered the halls of academia, employed as a part of youth identity formation, or became a site of memory and entertainment for seniors.
Elizabeth Clendinning (Wake Forest University)
Gamelan Chameleon: Cultural Representation and Academic Asian-American Ensembles
The Indonesian-American community is small; however, Indonesian gamelan (percussion orchestra) ensembles have gained an outsized presence within American academic music programs in the past six decades since the first two academic gamelan ensembles were founded at the University of California-Los Angeles. Due to the ensembles’ association with this foundational academic program, their impressive aural and visual presence, their approachability for novice musicians, and their clear ability to address cultural diversity initiatives, gamelan have spread across the country. Currently, there are approximately two hundred gamelan in the United States that give performances, half of which are anchored at collegiate institutions. American musicians—mostly white, though also Latinx and East Asian—provide the primary membership of such ensembles. Often the only Asian music ensembles in their specific collegiate settings, gamelan have come to represent Indonesian, Southeast Asian, and Asian musical culture as a whole. This mode of representation of Indonesian musical communities and of Asian music more broadly has been a subject of much critique.
Based on nearly a decade of research within American gamelan communities, this paper examines how gamelan communities have approached the task of representation. I suggest that the construction of transnational, transgenerational gamelan communities and the chameleon-like abilities of the ensembles to be incorporated into both traditionalist and experimental or activist situations has allowed gamelan communities to present both as Asian and post-Asian musical phenomena. I conclude by reflecting on potential paths for academic gamelan ensembles within the ever-shifting environment of collegiate ensemble instruction.
Rachel Schuck (University of Miami)
Carnatic Music Transplanted to America: Innovations of Youth in “Sustaining Sampradaya”
1978 marked the first year of the Cleveland Thyagaraja Festival in Ohio. Taking inspiration from the annual Thyagaraja Aradhana in Tiruvaiyaru, India, the festival has made waves in both the Indian and North American communities, attracting over 8,000 attendees for the 12-day event. An explicit goal of the festival is to support and encourage youth involvement in order to uphold the excellence of and veneration for the Carnatic tradition. Scholars such as Kathryn Hansen, Alison Booth, and Jeff Roy have explored the adaptation of Carnatic music to new developments and technologies such as an increasing global accessibility and the revision of traditional pedagogy for internet lessons. These scholars, however, have primarily been concerned with online communities, while most live experiences and community-building festivals remain untheorized. Such festivals reveal much about transnational identity formation among Asian American musicians.
As Carnatic music’s education system shifts and develops, performance practices and live venues reflect the impact of this music’s migration to the U.S. In 2007, the Festival introduced the “Sustaining Sampradaya” program, where additions to traditional pedagogical structures reveal the impact of transnational elements in the transmission and success of Carnatic music among youth in the community. In this paper, drawing on ethnographic observations of the 2018 festival and interviews with organizers and participants, I demonstrate that the performance spaces and community accessibility provided through the Cleveland Thyagaraja Festival’s education program reveal the globalization of this tradition and contribute to the re-formation of South Asian identity in American education and music performance contexts.
Lydia Huang (Temple University)
Songs of China(town): Music, Memory, and Identity
This paper examines the musical practices of Chinese seniors (age 60 and over) in weekly singing classes in Chinatown, Philadelphia. These seniors are a special group within the Chinese diasporic community, as many have lived under Mao’s regime and through the reform era. In turn, they have experienced periods where music was used as an educational tool, as a political weapon, and as products for consumption. Given their varied experiences with music, what does music making look like for them in Philadelphia? My presentation will answer the following two questions: first, what songs have they preserved and performed in Philadelphia? From examining their corpus of almost three hundred songs accumulated from ten years of weekly singing classes, I will focus on three types of songs—love songs, nationalist songs, and songs of filial piety—and discuss how they evoke images of utopia. Second, the added dimension of geographical separation or relocation also brings about questions of memory and identity (re)construction. How do these people express their own Chineseness? I will treat the singing class as a “site of contradiction” (Zheng 2010) that challenges and complicates the notion of “Chineseness.” To end, I will discuss how their musical practices fit within the Asian-American narrative. In recent years, scholars Nancy Rao (2000, 2002, 2011, 2016, 2017) and Su Zheng (2010) have established a space for Chinese Americans and their musics in American history. As such, my paper will also situate this community of seniors within this space.
Friday, November 9, 3:25-4:25pm
Militarism and the Music of Asian America
Chair: Ricky Punzalan (University of Maryland)
From the annexation of Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines to the Asian theater in World War II and subsequent Japanese occupation, and from the Korean War to the Vietnam war and the illegal, covert bombings of Cambodia and Laos, U.S. military policy has—since the late 19th century—changed the fates of Asians along the Pacific Rim, and led many to immigrate to North America. This panel explores how U.S. militarism has affected the creation, dissemination and reception of the music of Asian America.
Christine Bacareza Balance (Cornell University):
We are Here Because You Were There: U.S. Militarism & the Musics of Asian America
The question, “What is Asian American music?,” has been widely debated in both Asian American and popular music studies. Scholars such as Deborah Wong, Joseph Lam, and Oliver Wang have argued for it as performative process (what Asian Americans do), a heuristic device (a means of “testing” by trial & error), and even its organization into historical periods (pre-panethnic, Asian American movement, and the “new Asiatics” at the turn of the 21st century). While social and cultural histories of the early Asian American movement account for its simultaneously domestic and transnational concerns—the wars in Southeast Asia as well as the civil rights struggles fought “at home”—what has not yet been addressed in a direct or sustained manner is how “Asian American music” has been constituted by over 100 years of militarized relations between the U.S. and its Asian counterparts. My paper addresses the role of U.S. militarism by listening in on primary musical examples and surveying secondary sources that evidence how U.S. war, occupation, and military bases in the Asia/Pacific are the conditions of possibility for what we can call “Asian American music.” From ds, I argue that, rather than subscribing to simplistic theories of cultural imperialism, a focus on U.S. militarism’s role expands the geographical and political reaches of Asian American music – its songs, places, circulation, and discourse.
Elaine Kathryn Andres (UC Irvine)
Typical Finesse: Bruno Mars and the Training of Race in U.S. Empire
No stranger to charges of cultural appropriation, Filipino Puerto Rican American pop star, Bruno Mars is a key subject in debates on blackness and the mainstream. Atlantic music correspondent, Spencer Kornhaber in a compliment-tinged insult, crowns him the “multiracial Adele” for his crossover appeal. In a recap of Mars’ acceptance speech at the 2018 Grammys, Kornhaber concludes, “[He] showed typical finesse by telling a story about being 15 and performing in Hawaii for tourists who’d come from around the world. ‘24K Magic was written in that same spirit of togetherness…’ It’s a valid justification for lively pop in tough times. But…widely acceptable, and indifferent to the now, as Mars’ songs.” Kornhaber’s dismissal of Mars’ work in Hawaii’s tourist industry as an insignificant detail to his musical training and genealogy echo the sentiments of many critics after the performer’s Grammy sweep over black artists such as Kendrick Lamar and Jay-Z who are more readily regarded as politically significant acts.
This paper examines Mars’ racialized reception to ask how the Asian American performing body mediates perceptions of race, place, and the political in U.S. popular music. Specifically, I examine Mars’ training and labor as an Elvis impersonator to trace the contours of the militourism entertainment complex in the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Hawaii and to situate his framing as an unthreatening and apolitical multicultural figure in U.S. popular music within deflected processes of U.S. militarism and the tourism industry’s coeval logics of imperial amnesia.
Friday, November 9, 4:30-5:00pm
Tour of “American Peril: Imagining the Foreign Threat”
Led by Co-Curator Rob Buscher
“American Peril: Imagining the Foreign Threat” displays more than 40 original prints of anti-Asian propaganda in the United States from the 1870s to the present day. It is in four sections: (1) Chinese Exclusion and Propaganda Supporting the Annexation of the Philippines, (2) Anti-Japanese Propaganda during WWII, (3) Japan Bashing in the 1970s and 1980s, and (4) Post-9/11 Islamophobia.
This exhibit and the associated programming aim to educate the public about the complex history of Anti-Asian racism in the US and encourage audiences to think critically about contemporary political rhetoric. By placing prints from close to a 150-year span together, we hope to show both continuities and changes in U.S. racial politics. The audience will recognize how the exclusion logic, which was first applied to people of Chinese descent, came to be employed for people of Japanese descent in the early-mid 20th century and people of Middle Eastern origins in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. They will also realize how malleable the concept of an “inassimilable alien” is, as they will see the term applied to everything from “coolies” to “model minorities” and from Buddhists to Muslims.
The co-curators of “American Peril: Imagining the Foreign Threat” are Rob Buscher and Atif Sheikh. Buscher is a film and media specialist who has worked in many aspects of film including production, administration, and distribution. He has worked as a professional film programmer in a wide variety of genres. Some of his career highlights include co-founding Zipangu Fest, the UK’s premier Japanese Film Festival, and creating the Japanese Cinema and Asian American Studies curriculum at Arcadia University. A longtime member of the Japanese American Citizen’s League and current President of the organization’s Philadelphia chapter, Rob is an expert on Japanese American history and Japanese American activism.
Sheikh is cofounder and resident curator of Twelve Gates Arts. He orchestrated and curates the annual 12G experimental video art festival, the pilot performance art biennial in Philadelphia, “perform[art]ive”, and has curated other art exhibitions such as “Not so black & white” (2010), “Cinephiliac” (2013), Lived Experiences (2016), Masterminding Our Ordered Rage (2017), and an ongoing project called “alternative narratives of history and exploration of memory through art.” The common thread through these and other projects undertaken by Atif is community engagement with social change through art.
Saturday, November 10, 10:15am-12:15pm
What is Asian American Music?
Chair: Brian Sengdala (Rutgers University)
What is “Asian American music”? Some argue that it is not only a useful political and heuristic device, but also a beneficial term for building a community of artists. Others, however, have posited that we should not use this term because there is no distinctive musical style in music made by Asian Americans. This panel explores how Asian American musicians participating in different genres use style to contend with stereotypes and the North American racial landscape.
Dan Wang (University of Pittsburgh)
What is an Asian American style? Superorganism in the Assimilated Public
What do we desire when we desire the existence of an Asian American music? What would be achieved by identifying a musical style as Asian American? Style, I argue, can allow members of a minority to recognize one another and thereby form communities (i.e. punk style, queer style), but at the cost of a public language that can be commodified, appropriated, and used to limit that very group’s expressive options. Can we get what we want from musical style—i.e. a way to recognize one another in the U.S. cultural landscape—without producing a language vulnerable to consumption?
This paper engages with the indie band Superorganism, and in particular its lead singer Orono Noguchi. I will describe what I call Noguchi’s stage anti-presence: Noguchi often barely moves, obscuring her face and singing with an untrained voice. In interviews, she is either flat and ironic or doesn’t speak at all. Noguchi’s persona is introverted, but it could also be called unassimilated, insofar as assimilation refers to learning conventions and styles that allow one to seamlessly appear in public.
Discussing Superorganism in the context of Asian American studies, public sphere theory, and style theory (and alongside the MTV cartoon Daria), I will show how Noguchi’s style cannot be explicitly marked “Asian” but is nonetheless a style about Asiannness: that is, about the stylistics of assimilation as a practice of “appearing” in public. As a result, she becomes a strangely intimate figure while declining to contribute to the stylistic taxonomy of U.S. “diversity.”
Peng Liu (University of Texas, Austin)
From Learn Chinese to Chinese New Year: A Journey of Voicing Authenticity in MC Jin’s Rap Music
The obstacles that Asian Americans’ racial identity incurs become ever manifest when they aim to survive in rap music, a genre that has dominantly been perceived as a cultural signifier of blackness. The first Asian American rapper with a legitimate chance to find mainstream success did not appear until the early 2000s when Chinese American MC Jin gained his fame out of BET’s 106 and Park freestyle battle competition. Jin’s increasing popularity makes his “inauthentic” race ever apparent. The issue of how Asian American rappers in their music deal with the issue of racial “inauthenticity” and resist racial stereotypes has been under studied. Drawing on scholarships in Asian American studies (Ancheta 2006; Fong 2008) and rap music studies (Wang 2007), this paper aims to discuss the issue by offering a close reading of two rap tracks by Jin—“Learn Chinese” (2004) and “Chinese New Year” (2014). Although both songs share similar strategies in asserting Jin’s own racial and cultural elements—such as the interpolation of Cantonese dialogues and the use of a Chinese instrumental sounding loop, they indicate a fundamental distinction in ways of expressing authenticity. “Learn Chinese” turns out to be a reconstruction of hegemonic black masculinity with an Asian face, while “Chinese New Year” embraces what sounds authentic to Jin’s own experience as a Chinese American. Jin’s different strategies of positioning himself in rap culture reflect ongoing struggles of Asian American rappers who since the 1990s have been striving to voice their resistance against structural racism while uttering their unique rap sound.
Toru Momii (Columbia University)
Performing While Asian: Yuja Wang, Sarah Chang, and Asian (American) Embodiment in Western Art Music
My paper considers how performance analysis can illuminate the ways in which Asian and Asian-American performers of Western art music have operated within and responded to racialized narratives of difference. Building upon recent work by Yoshihara (2007), Yang (2011), and Wang (2015), I first explore how Asian and Asian-American performers are faced with a conflicting narrative of inclusion and exclusion in American society. While the model minority myth feeds the illusion that Western art music is meritocratic and thus free of racism, Asian and Asian-American musicians are continuously framed as outsiders in a strictly European tradition, essentializing Asian and Asian-American performers as possessing “incredibly perfect technique” but lacking “musicality” (Yang 2011).
I then argue that these narratives have challenged Asian and Asian-American performers to renegotiate their identities vis-à-vis the hegemony of whiteness in Western art music. Drawing upon recent methodologies in performance analysis (Zbikowski 2011; Cook 2013), I demonstrate how performances by Chinese pianist Yuja Wang and Korean-American violinist Sarah Chang represent two contrasting responses to the racial stereotypes to which Asian and Asian-American performers are subjected. In a performance of Mozart’s Turkish March, Wang adopts the persona of a hypervirtuoso, choosing to embrace rather than resist the stereotype of Asian musicians as technicians. Chang, on the other hand, works to transcend her racialized past as an Asian child prodigy by relearning pieces she had performed in her youth and acquiring contemporary repertoire. Whereas Wang claims ownership of the Asian-as-technician stereotype, Chang redisciplines her body to reinvent her racialized identity.
Joseph Small (Swarthmore College)
Looking Back: Spall Fragments: Taiko Drumming-Dance Action-Adventure for the 21st Century!
For the past fifty years, taiko drumming has served as a popular vehicle for Asian-Americans to express self-identity and empowerment, embody ancestral memory, and combat stereotyping. Despite earning heartfelt and cathartic responses from audiences worldwide, taiko often falls victim to its own spectacle of large drums struck with quasi-martial, virtuosic choreography. Conflated with transnational complexities of taiko’s cultural and historical contexts, and the intrinsic Othering of Asian-America, the art may buttress Orientalist structures instead of undermining them.
Spall Fragments, my original, evening-length stage production, mixes taiko, dance, and serio-comic theatre, as a critical response to the explosion of problematic issues surrounding Asian-American taiko practice, performance, and pedagogy. Particularly, Spall Fragments highlights a dense network comprising cultural appropriation and invented tradition, Capitalism and (self)exoticism, (hyper)masculine patriarchal dynamics and gender roles, as well as the physical and psychological risks in pursuing the art form.
Spall Fragments was performed in 2015 and 2016 in Los Angeles and San Francisco by a diverse cast of professional taiko artists, with a discussion presentation on the production first hosted at the Taiko and Activism panel of the 2017 North American Taiko Conference at UCSD. Supported by media samples of the performances, through critical discussion of Spall Fragments‘ creative processes in reference to both academic discourse on taiko, as well as personal experiences as a taiko artist in the USA and Japan, I will outline the intricate landscape of contemporary Asian-American taiko before concluding on how a new wave of taiko practitioners navigate these persistent issues.
Saturday, November 10, 1:45-2:30pm
Workshop: No-No Boy: Storytelling History & Identity through Art
Chair: Michelle Myers (Yellow Rage)
No-No Boy is a multimedia concert performed by Julian Saporiti and Erin Aoyama, doctoral students at Brown University. The No-No Boy workshop will focus on a close examination of the power of storytelling through recovery and curation of archival imagery, specifically about questions of immigration, identity, incarceration, migration, and refugees across Asian America. Saporiti and Aoyama, as researchers and artists, will discuss with participants the ways in which they utilize archival visuals to create an added visual dimension to their storytelling and music. The duo will break down their process of combining songwriting, scholarship, and film editing to create their work, inviting participants to think about how the intersection of historical research and personal identity exploration might serve their own art making processes. Together, we will think about our identities and histories as sources for storytelling inspiration, exploring the meaning of these two words, “identity” and “history,” and have a conversation about potential work which might come from these personal and historical archives.
Saturday, November 10, 2:45-4:30pm
Film Screening and Discussion: Havana Divas
Presenter and Discussion Leader: Nancy Yunhwa Rao (Rutgers University)
Caridad Amaran and Georgina Wong learned the art of Cantonese opera in 1930s Havana. Caridad’s mentor was her foster father, Julian Fong, who immigrated to Cuba in the 1920s after his family forbade him performing opera. Georgina’s father was a famous tailor in Chinatown, who encouraged her to learn Kungfu and lion dance. Although both were the single children, they formed a sisterhood on stage. Throughout the 1940s, Caridad toured cities all over Cuba with Chinese communities, as one of the leading actresses of the opera troupe. Georgina quit opera to attend college, but her study was interrupted by Castro’s 1959 revolution and her required military service. Eventually, she went on to become a diplomat. After retirement and well into their sixties, the two sisters are trying to perform Cantonese opera again. Will they find a stage? Will they find an audience?
Saturday, November 10, 4:45-5:30pm
Workshop: Sining Kapuluan
Chair: Micaela Bottari
How can Non-Western music and dance be preserved and practiced in a way that honors social-politico-historical contexts and cultural identity? Should we avoid transactional learning experiences when music and dance is traditionally part of the lifestyle, not a performance? When can “cultural art” enter the Western realms of “high art”? Does the meaning of traditional music and dance change when practiced by diaspora and outsiders?
These are all questions Sining Kapuluan, a Brooklyn-based educational arts group, focuses on when learning and performing music and dance inspired by traditional Filipino culture. The Philippines in particular has a complicated history of colonialism, war, and political unrest. Yet, her culture is rich with beauty. In a country consisting of over 7,000 islands, there are areas with music and dance practices that have survived the many changes and continue to be practiced today. A growing community of Filipinos and Filipino diaspora want to keep these traditions alive—including Sining Kapuluan.
Sining Kapuluan traces their roots to 2nd and 3rd generation Filipino and Filipino American artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who have learned directly from masters in Maguindanao and Cotabato. The group’s repertoire incorporates kulintang, dabakan, gandingan, malong, pangalay, and much more. Sining Kapuluan will share their distinct learning process, and talk about their individual journeys in the arts and identity exploration.
Sunday, November 10, 10:15am-11:45pm
Militarism, Masculinity and the Music of Asian America
Chair: Mandi Magnuson-Hung (Wells Fargo History Museum)
One of the most enduring stereotypes in North America is the emasculated Asian male. Created in the late 19th century, this belief arose partly because early Chinese immigrants often had queues and wore silk gowns, and partly because they were forced to take jobs doing what many White Americans considered “women’s work.” As several recent polls and Steve Harvey’s putdown of Asian men demonstrate, this stereotype is still alive and well today. This panel explores how Asian American musicians and the World War II Museum in New Orleans have dealt with issues of Asian masculinity.
Alan Parkes (New York University)
Asian American Hardcore: Defying Inveterate Conservatism in Subculture
The economic and social conditions of the 1980s offer insight into the era’s youth cultures. The ways in which these conditions affected race and how this was mirrored among youth unveils the influence of prevailing conservative principles on youth cultures, particularly within hardcore punk and its largely white membership, in which purported opposition to larger social structures alternatively turned to subcultural conservative representation. Limited Asian American participation in hardcore stems from this representation. The failures of laissez-faire-minded policies to address systemic disparities in race, alongside the same failures in a purportedly inclusive and egalitarian subculture, prompts investigation into the ways in which conditions created by the former influenced the latter. In spite of hardcore’s general embrace of progressive principles, emphasis on freedom, and nonconformist ideals, this influence created a hardcore scene that embraced the exclusivity characteristic of larger social structures. Although the subculture’s mental space attempted to defy hegemonic social norms, its physical space reaffirmed them, creating a largely white space. Consequently, in attempting to challenge internalized structures of power, hardcore unconsciously recast them in a physical form. Employing oral histories from Asian American hardcore members, this paper emphasizes their participation in the music and scene and how they defied the racial makeup of the subculture and, consequently, its adherence to conservatism.
Dan Blim (Denison University)
Music for the Pacific Theater: Scoring Asian Identities at the WWII Museum
Since it opened in 2000, the World War II Museum in New Orleans has expanded to encompass five pavilions and multiple exhibits. The increased size allows the museum to approach some issues in multiple—and contradictory—ways. In particular, the museum’s depiction of Japanese and Japanese-Americans suggests some negotiating between the museum’s promotion of explicitly American values and its desire to recognize diversity. Moreover, this negotiation frequently happens through sound and music within the exhibits.
Drawing on exhibition theory, fieldwork at the museum, and interviews with the museum and audio installation staff, I consider how three spaces continually recast visitors’ understanding of the Japanese and Japanese-Americans. First, the immersive film Beyond All Boundaries combines Orientalist tropes, modernist sounds, and conventionally emotive film scoring techniques to direct audience sympathies both toward and against the Japanese. Second, the paired “Road to Tokyo” and “Road to Berlin” exhibits showcase how music and sound effects exoticize the Pacific campaign compared to the European. Finally, a room devoted to Japanese-American internment camps within the “Arsenal of Democracy” exhibit, which chronicles the home-front war efforts, integrates Japanese-American experiences into the broader American war efforts. Here, recognition of the containment of Japanese-American citizens are ironically underscored by the patriotic music that is not “contained” by neighboring rooms, exerting a subtle but forceful presence even in this demarcated space. Considering these three spaces together illuminates both the broader challenges museums face when tackling legacies of race and violence and how sound specifically works to meet those challenges.
Donna Kwon (University of Kentucky)
Empathetic Asian American Queer Masculinity, Juxtaposed Narratives, and Double Consciousness in the Music of St. Lenox
Existing literature on Asian American music has tended to focus on performers in rap, jazz and classical music. In this paper, I focus on singer-songwriter Andrew Choi, who goes by the moniker St. Lenox. In October 2016, Choi released his second album titled Ten Hymns From My American Gothic, which was hailed as “a 21st century pop masterpiece” (PopMatters). The themes of this work were later expanded in a visual concept album released in June 2017 that addressed the aftermath of the presidential election. In this paper, I will explore various creative techniques that Choi employs in several key songs of this visual album. Through video analysis, I hone in on his prominent use of juxtaposed extra-lyrical narrative and horizontal split-screen video production. I posit that these techniques reinforce a sense of “double consciousness” (Du Bois) often experienced by many “hyphenated” Americans. By drawing on performance observations and interviews, I will examine Choi’s double-ness (or other potential hyphenations) in light of his immigrant experiences and queer identity. While Choi’s writing is ostentatious and his voice arresting throughout, his image is deliberately drab. Rarely portrayed as a performing artist, Choi is more commonly seen walking, eating, and performing what Ju Yon Kim calls the “embodied everyday racial mundane” (2015). I argue that St. Lenox conjures an intersectional vision of Asian American masculinity, one that resists stereotypes and is empathetic in ways that might “inspire people to do good works and better understand the humanity in the people around them” (Choi 2017).
Sunday, November 10, 11:45am-12:30pm
Workshop: Activist Songbook with Byron Au Yong and Aaron Jafferis
Chair: Lei Ouyang Bryant (Swarthmore College)
Join San Francisco-based composer Byron Au Yong and New Haven-based writer Aaron Jafferis as they teach material from Activist Songbook. This collection of 53 songs and raps to counteract hate is based on interviews of Asian American, immigrant, and refugee organizers. This interactive workshop includes story-sharing and vocalizing to serve as a springboard for future organizing. The project started in 2017, and continues in multiple cities with interviews, workshops, and performances through the next U.S. Presidential Election on November 3, 2020.
Activist Songbook is created as part of (ex)CHANGE: History Place Presence, a project of Asian Arts Initiative. Original support for (ex)CHANGE: History Place Presence was provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Additional support from Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Residency Program and Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience.
Sunday, November 10, 1:15-2:00pm
Workshop: Word To Your Motherland: A Hip-Hop Exploration of South Asian American Identity with Seti X
Chair: Annar Desai-Stephens (Eastman School of Music)
Join Los Angeles born, South Asian American Sikh Recording Artist SETI X for this workshop exploring Hip-Hop Culture and its relationship with South Asian American youth and their development of self-identity. As a co-founder of India’s First All Hip-Hop Collective, SETI X has travelled the world representing South Asian American Hip-Hop for the last 10 years. Participants will be able to hear music and watch videos of the development of this scene from the early 80’s onwards. In this workshop we will explore the trajectory of artists who have pioneered this space, as well as the current musical landscapes of South Asian American artists reclaiming their culture and expressing themselves through Hip-Hop Music. We will explore influences that have crossed over from the “Asian Underground” Movement in the UK, as well as explore ideas of cultural pollination across the world from the US to India.
Sunday, November 10, 2:00-4:00pm
Film Screening and Discussion: Forbidden City, USA
Chair: Eric Hung (Music of Asian America Research Center)
Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Arthur Dong’s classic documentary Forbidden City, USA takes you inside the glamorous world of Chinatown nightclubs in World War II San Francisco where you’ll meet the “Chinese Fred Astaire,” the “Chinese Sophie Tucker,” and the “Chinese Sally Rand” – just some of the performers from the Big Band era when Chinese were known for laundries and chop suey joints. Eighty years before the all-Asian cast of Crazy Rich Asians made box office headlines, the world famous Forbidden City nightclub was shocking America with it’s “all-Chinese” American floorshows. Digitally re-mastered by UCLA Film & TV Archive from original film negatives, Forbidden City, USA reveals the ground-breaking stories of Asian American entertainers from a bygone era, telling the true life stories that inspired both the musical Flower Drum Song, and Lisa See’s novel China Dolls.
Following the screening, there will have a guided discussion about the film, the music of our youth, the roles that identity played in the music we listened to and played, and more generally the representation of Asians/Asian Americans in music.